Chaos Reading discussion

I've been working away on this book for a little while now and thought I'd start my thread. This is my first venture into hard sci-fi, and believe me, this is hard! That's one of the reasons that I decided to take the challenge, because it is so outside of anything I've read before and is definitely not anything I would have chosen on my own.

I haven't thought this much about these topics since the lectures of my German physics professor, and those were even more watered down than a lot of the theories Egan uses (it was just an introductory level, science requirement course for those of us more interested in English and history). As I read, I'm sure that I'm not getting it all, but I think I've got the basics, and to me, the story behind the science is enough to keep me interested even when I'm glazing over at those bits.

I also enjoy the bits of humor that are thrown in as well. Like when Rakesh, probably the most "human" of the characters, describes how a meal is prepared for him on another planet: "Fith insisted on cooking them into a spicy stew, using tools rather than his mouth to manipulate the ingredients, no doubt having been briefed by Massa's library on certain peoples' preference for food wholly unmasticated by others."

Nice! I'm glad the challenge is challengey enough for you :)